Head of Siri’s team apparently getting reassigned at Apple

Bill Stasior (pictured), who was lured from Amazon in 2012 to lead Siri after two of the personal digital assistant’s creators left Apple, is no longer heading the voice assistant group, though he remains at the tech giant, according to a report at The Information, citing unnamed “people familiar with the matter.”

Stasior was previously attached to Amazon’s A9 search arm. He came to Apple in 2012 to oversee Siri following the departure of Siri co-founders Adam Cheyer and Dag Kittlaus. 

The article adds that the change appears to be part of an effort by John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, “to put more of his own stamp on the group responsible for Apple’s voice assistant.” The Information says that Giannandrea’s team is now focusing on long-term research versus the short-term incremental updates Siri has been seeing for several years.

In July 2018, it was announced that Giannandrea has taken over leadership of Siri, which was previously overseen by software engineering chief Craig Federighi. 

Before coming to Apple, he had been senior vice president for Search at Google since Feb. 26, 2016. Prior to this, he served as vice president of Engineering at the company and led its sprawling research and artificial intelligence efforts. 

Giannandrea was co-founder of Tellme Networks, and served as its chief technology officer and vice president of Platform Development. He was responsible for the development and operation of Tellme’s pioneering Voice Application Network. He also oversaw Tellme’s leadership contribution to VoiceXML and other Internet-based telephony standards.